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Comment by esja | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying you think this was a failed coup? On what basis? It looks nothing like the coups I'm familiar with.

Trump has always gotten away with the things he was gravely incompetent at on the basis of his incompetence. This is just another case. He was pushing Pence to use power he didn't have. His allies all pushed the fraud narrative. And he provoked a riot that proceeded to follow his orders and storm the capital.

This is what a weak coup looks like in 2020 America. None of the action above were based on preserving order or upholding the constitution or fullfilling his oath of office or protecting our democracy or being in the right. It was a power grab doomed from the start, but never the less, a power grab and a sorry attempt at a coup.

That's an interesting and reasonable perspective. If you stretch the definition of a coup to include totally incoherent, incompetent, ineffectual raging that could never actually achieve the outcome, it could qualify. But it still feels like a stretch to me based on what I know of coups (sadly some personal experience there).

I also think calling it a coup inflames tensions and risks credibility for no real benefit. A sober and precise description of events is damning enough.

The struggle over vocabulary is evident. The truth is it could be called all or none of these things. There was a professor on NPR who also said how each term (terrorism, insurrection, coup) has legal connotations. But I call BS on all of it. Getting people to not say coup is already evidence of damage control against the factual, universal, objective, scientific "coup-ness" nature of it all. Semmantics is always arguable, but I am not lying, I have no agenda, and I am not gaming anything with how I express the situation. Like with most "normal" people with no power or say in the situation.

But of course, whether anything crosses legal lines in accordance to legal vocabulary is all these bent politicians are concerned about, because that's the only thing that would stop them by landing them in jail. That's why most of them are lawyers. The non-lawyers have a hard time surviving. We'll see what happens with Trump.

Both points apply to both sides.

That's a fair position to take. We just have different definitions of what constitutes a coup.

I certainly agree politics is way too corrupt and the constant lawfare is harmful.

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